Instead, he kissed her.
He kissed her on the cheek, heavily, smackingly, and his face came away with her blood on it. One by one the others kissed her too, surrounding her with groping hands and hungry mouths, and the moon shone down on her face, blanching her so she was nothing but black and white, blood and skin, an old movie monster, only she wept. She wept from a place so deep I can’t imagine it; she wept, and she smiled, even as they finished kissing her and began pulling her apart, each keeping a piece of her for themselves, just a scrap of flesh, which they ate solemnly, reverently. They didn’t squabble over it, her leg or her arm or her eyes, and Mrs. Halloway didn’t try to fight them. She had offered herself, I think, and they took her. I know what worship looks like.
I was crying by that time. You would, too, if you saw that. I had to cry or I had to throw up, and crying was quieter. Your body can make calculations like that, if it has to. But crying isn’t that quiet, really. One of them sniffed the air and turned toward me—the rest turned as one. They’re a herd, if they are anything. They know much more together than they know separately. I wonder if, in a few decades, they will have figured out how to run Channel 3, and will broadcast How to Recognize a Human in Three Easy Steps, or What We Know.
They fell on me, which is pretty much how zombies do anything. They groped and pulled, but there were too many of them for any one to get a good grip, and I may not have killed one before but I wasn’t opposed to the idea. I swung my fists and oh, they were so soft, like jam. I clamped my mouth shut—I knew my infection vectors as well as any kid in my generation. But they didn’t bite me, and finally my father threw back his head and bellowed. I know that bellow. I’ve always known it, and it hasn’t changed. They pulled away, panting, exhausted. That was the first time I realized how fragile they are. They’re like lions. In short bursts, they’ll eviscerate you and your zebra without a second thought. But they have to save up the strength for it, day in and day out. I stood there, back against the streetlamp, fingernails out, asthma kicking in because of course, it would. And my father limped over to me, dragging his broken left foot—they don’t die but they don’t heal. I tried to set it once and that was the closest I ever came to getting bitten before that night on the river.
He stood over me, his eyebrows crusted with old fluid, his eyes streaming tears like ink, his jaw dislocated and hanging, his cheeks puffed out with infection. He reached out and hooted gently like an ape. To anyone else it would have been just another animal noise from a rotting zombie, but I heard it as clear as anything: Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin. I had nowhere to go, and he reached for me, brushing my hair out of my face. With one bloody thumb he traced a circle onto my forehead, like a priest on Ash Wednesday. Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin.
His blood was cold.
After that, none of them ever came after me again. That’s why I can have my nice little habit of opening the Java Shack and writing in my notebooks. These are the days of Punky Princesses, and I am safe. The mark on my forehead never went away. It’s faint, like a birthmark, but it’s there. Sometimes I meet one of them on the road, wandering dazed and unhappy in the daylight, squinting as if it doesn’t understand where the light is coming from. When they see me, their eyes go dark with hunger—but then, their gaze flicks up to my forehead, and they fall down on their knees, keening and sobbing. It’s not me, I know that. It’s the cathedral, still growing, on the banks of the Kennebec. The mark means I’m of the faith, somehow. Saint Caitlin of the Java Shack, Patroness of the Living.